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Personally, I stopped using KDE4 when 4.3 came out and switched to standalone X + Xmonad.
Each release of KDE 4.x seems to add even less front-end user features than the last. It seems that KDE devs are working for themselves. That is, to make coding of KDE easier, but user remains forgotten. KDE brainstorm is full of great-revolutionary ideas, but noone bothers to implement them. Instead, they chose to add something like "semantic desktop". Seriously? When was the last time, when you "rated" a file?

Space usability of KDE4 just sucks. Windows, dialogs are filled with gray spaces, which could be used to show something useful.

Kde 4.5 is nowhere close in customizeability to 3.5 in my opinion. In KDE 3.5 i could change pixmap of any panel without creating a new theme, I could change transparency. Also in KDE 4.5 I can't set fixed panel height (I like all my panels to be 16 pixels height). Now I need to edit KDE's config files manually, but only after killing plasma-desktop.

It just doesn't feel to be powerful anymore. That is why i switched to standalone X + Xmonad, because there I have all the options in the world.
It feels that KDE has lost something when transitioning between 3.x and 4.x, maybe they tried to make KDE "simpler", which would be just stupid.

KDE 4.x does everything I need it to do and I'm quite satisfied. Most of the work is under the hood, and I really like this.

Transparently logging into a remote server via fish:// from dolphin and copying it onto a removable medium which was automatically detected, and having all of it seamless, that's what a DE should be providing in the first place.

Instead, they chose to add something like "semantic desktop". Seriously? When was the last time, when you "rated" a file?.

Funny, just two hours ago I was tagging the photos from this year's holidays. And father also uses this a lot to tag and rate documents for company. If you can't find any use for a feature that doesn't mean some of us don't. In fact I now even can't imagine living without this "useless semantic features".

Funny, just two hours ago I was tagging the photos from this year's holidays. And father also uses this a lot to tag and rate documents for company. If you can't find any use for a feature that doesn't mean some of us don't. In fact I now even can't imagine living without this "useless semantic features".

I am currently using Arch Linux with GNOME, and while this upgrade probably won't make me switch, i might give it a try to see what's new and if it is finally stable. I have tried every past version and i always had many problems with it.

While KDE is flashy, i dislike it visually. I prefer the simplicity and clarity of GNOME. A Desktop Environment should be there just to help you run your programs, organize your running programs, creating shortcuts for programs and settings and displaying some information like time etc, nothing more nothing less. KDE gives me the impression that it tries to impress the user with multiple choices, like having 100s of choices 99% of the people wouldn't bother changing makes it a more sophisticated environment... And i hate its plastic toy feel. Plus i find plasma widgets useless...

There is also the Myth that KDE is more advanced. It isn't. It is just tha not every aspect of a typical GNOME desktop is part of GNOME itself. For example Compiz isn't part of GNOME but it is used almost universally. Pulseaudio, gstreamer, mono, cairo dock, are examples of software i use to make my environment better that do not belong to GNOME, but cooperate nicely with it. KDE strives for better intergration and while you can use that software with it too, it doesn't cooperate that well, for example i still find pulseaudio intergration lacking and amarok doesn't work with gstreamer backend...

The other myth is that qt is superior just because it offers more functions than gtk, ignoring the fact that gtk is only supposed to offer just a gui toolkit and having other libraries offer the rest, while qt strives to be an all-in-one package. And while gtk is lacking transparency and blur, it will get them in version 3...

Another reason i dislike KDE is the culture of its developers. The mentality that "it works for me" is the answer to every critic. The blatant lies "never faced a crash since 4,1" i often read and think they must believe we are idiots. Their fixation on looks and not substance. Their negative approach on fixing serious problems like the encoding bug which leaves empty files which are not deletable.

For anyone wondering why i am writting this, it is the same reason everytime there is a new KDE version KDE fanbois don't miss the chance to bash GNOME.

PS: 2 paragraphs are enough, if you believe otherwise state the newsworthy items of 4.5 ... Except that 16000 bugs were fixed which means that previous versions were buggy as hell and KDE fanbois were lying about them having a stable system...

A lot of those bugs might be all duplicates. Different issues all caused by a single root problem because a lot is shared and connected in KDE4. Because seriously? Sixteen... thousand... bugs?

I have used KDE4 since even before 4.0. Plasma has been crashing on me with the first livecd of OpenSuSE with 4.0.

After that Plasma has only been misbehaving in terms of widgets since 4.1 up to 4.3.

Plasma has been crashing with Kubuntu whenever I upgraded it to the newer KDE versions in between Kubuntu releases. That means unsuported updates.

Amarok and Kopete crashed on me untill both were one enduse release past their initial enduse releases.

Because I wanted to have the latest KDE release that was shipped as supported and tested, I went with Fedora. 4.4 on Fedora have been solid, not as a rock, but as solid as man made superdiamonds. That is no joke.

I have tried an earlier version of Fedora in which file transfers from NTFS where not always completing, but KDE didn't crash, so I don't that was KDE's fault. That was 4.3 live on a seemingly dead HDD (computer short circuit by lightning impact so I made a temp system out of spare PC parts).

OpenSuSE has been known for shipping and backporting pre-release KDE4 apps. Novell is also developping KDE4, so that's probably why.

Gentoo users have the most vanilla KDE4 installs and _never_ heared one Gentoo user complain since 4.3.

That said I turn to KDE dot news instead for KDE related news. Phoronix is only for games and X.org related things. No wonder Michael is strugling. Take this as a massive hint...